Analysts: U.N. complacency may impede inspections

Analysts say U.N. complacency may impede inspections

MICHAEL J. JORDAN

Published 5:30 am, Saturday, October 5, 2002

UNITED NATIONS -- As the United States and Britain try to tighten the vice on Saddam Hussein with a disarm-or-else resolution, they face a resistance at the United Nations that has some observers muttering "here we go again."

Saddam's bob-and-weave to undermine weapons inspections would not have succeeded so long, say analysts, without complicity and complacency from the United Nations.

Whether because of energy and trade interests, Third World solidarity or the United Nations staff's apparent obsession to keep peace at all costs, an atmosphere pervades the 191-member body to not rock the boat.

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The United Nations boasts a wide range of programs, from combating AIDS/HIV and poverty, to sustainable development in the Third World. The world body and its secretary-general, Kofi Annan, were co-recipients of the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize. But analysts say the organization stumbles in perhaps its greatest mission: maintaining international peace and security.

Two years ago, the United Nations issued a mea culpa for not intervening in 1994 in the Rwandan Hutu genocide of some 800,000 Tutsis, and for its inactions in 1995, when the Serbs overran the United Nations' safe haven of Srebrenica and massacred some 7,000 Bosnian Muslims.

Nevertheless, many seem willing to restart the game of cat-and-mouse with Saddam, a man accused of crimes against humanity.

President Bush is demanding that the 15-member Security Council "show some backbone" and enforce its own resolutions.

Washington and London are pressing for a new council resolution that threatens "consequences" -- a euphemism for military action -- if Baghdad doesn't comply. France, Russia and China, the council's three other permanent, veto-bearing members, are opposed.

Meanwhile, some chastised Annan for touting Iraq's Sept. 16 agreement to allow the "unconditional" return of inspectors -- a deal emphasizing only their return, with nothing about "unconditional inspections." Baghdad is again attaching conditions to how U.N. inspectors would operate.

The parade of Iraq resolutions began in 1991, with Baghdad already under sanctions for invading Kuwait in 1990. In its Gulf War surrender, Iraq agreed to Security Council Resolution 687, the cornerstone of all subsequent resolutions, and the "destruction, removal or rendering harmless" of its weapons of mass destruction.

With the council united and determined, Saddam complied. The United Nations Special Commission inspectors, or UNSCOM, destroyed vast supplies of weaponry. Over time, though, Saddam grew more obstinate and deceptive. And the council's will weakened, partly by a desire to get back to doing business with Baghdad, partly because much of the world grew concerned with the suffering of ordinary Iraqis under sanctions.

Iraq extracted a 1996 concession from the United Nations that inspectors would not probe sites "sensitive" to Baghdad's national security. Annan then agreed in February 1998 to put off-limits eight so-called presidential sites.

In December 1998, the inspectors were withdrawn ahead of four days of joint U.S.-British airstrikes. That was the death knell of UNSCOM.

A year later, in a desperate bid to revive inspections, the Security Council passed Resolution 1284, replacing UNSCOM with the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission. Critics derided the new agency as "UNSCOM Lite" because 1284 called only for Iraq's "cooperation."